Nanotechnology Spotlight – Latest Articles

Researchers report a new a method to produce optical nanostructures on commercial contact lenses. This method aids in functionalizing and nanotexturing an of the shelf, commercial contact lens. This adds to the trend of the humble contact lens, widely used to correct common vision problems, being on its way to become a 'smart' diagnostic tool. Tears contain diagnostic information regarding ocular diseases, and they can be used as a surrogate medium for analyzing blood chemistry.

Researchers have used a few-layer antimonene nanosheet to demonstrate all optical modulation in optical signal processing. To utilize the saturable absorption property of few-layer antimonene, antimonene-decorated microfiber was employed as an optical saturable absorber that can allow for passive mode-locking, Q-switching and all-optical thresholding at the telecommunication band. These results may provide guidance for the application of antimonene and other Group VA mono-elemental 2D materials in ultra-short pulse generation and all optical thresholding with enhanced long term stability.

Researchers report a simple method to facilitate the mass production of flexible photonic crystals (FPCs) with full-color grating properties. The nanoimprinted FPC structure is capable of displaying full-color grating properties because of the nano-hemispherical structures on its surface. This novel approach requires relatively inexpensive equipment and much less time than previous techniques. In addition, multiple anti counterfeiting applications can be easily implemented based on the polymer's intrinsic characteristics.

Single- or few-layer black phosphorus (BP) is one of the most promising two-dimensional semiconductors for electronic and optoelectronic device applications but its environmental instability has always posed a major hurdle for BP-based devices. In contrast, black phosphorus analogues (BPA) nanoarchitectures not only own the similar folded structure of BP, its tunable bandgap energy band and high carrier mobility, but exhibit excellent environmental stability as well. BPA nanosheets can be fabricated by a facile liquid-phase exfoliation method.

The metacanvas is a completely new generation of technology compared to all previous works. It is a tunable photonic devices based on vanadium dioxide that is lithography-free and fully reconfigurable. oth the patterns and the functionalities of the metacanvas can be arbitrarily reconfigured, which leads to many more degrees of freedom in metasurface design and functionalities. One piece of metacanvas is able to function as different optical components - hologram, phase-array, polarizer, modulator, etc. - at different times and on command, which has never been achieved in any of the previous VO2.

Plasmonic metasurfaces can be designed to achieve the singular-phase condition, yet this typically requires complex electromagnetic design and low-throughput fabrication techniques such as electron beam lithography. In a new work, researchers have developed a simple and robust planar singular-phase sensing platform for remote temperature detection, which does not require nano-patterning and exhibits singular-phase behavior due to the excitation of topologically-protected Tamm surface states.

Researchers have merged two important technologies of nanomanipulation - plasmonic tweezers and magnetically driven microbots - in order to overcome their individual limitations and achieve new functionalities that did not exist before. This technique is applicable to different types of particles in various fluids. The resulting mobile nanotweezers' performance combines the best of both worlds: capturing, maneuvering, and positioning sub micrometer objects of various materials at low illumination intensities, high speeds, and with great control.